Stripe is winning the SaaS infrastructure war.

We've shipped Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Braintree, GoCardless, Mollie, Paddle, and LemonSqueezy across client and own-built projects. The honest takeaway in 2025 is that Stripe has become the default for almost every SaaS we ship — and the alternatives are increasingly chosen for one specific reason at a time, not as full replacements.

The payment-provider landscape, side by side

What Stripe got right

• 01Developer experience that nobody else has matched in a decade.
• 02Stripe Checkout — a hosted checkout that the team rarely needs to customise.
• 03Stripe Billing — subscription logic that handles every edge case we used to write ourselves.
• 04Stripe Tax — saved every SaaS we ship from a tax-compliance project of its own.
• 05Connect for marketplaces. Almost no real competitor for split payments at scale.
• 06Webhook design that's actually sensible — idempotency keys, retry policies, signature verification.
• 07Test mode that mirrors production exactly. We've shipped flows from local dev to live without integration surprises.

A typical Stripe Checkout integration

What 'wire up a SaaS subscription' looks like in 2025. Three files. The Stripe-side magic is in the Price object you've set up in their dashboard.

import Stripe from 'stripe'

const stripe = new Stripe(process.env.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY!)

export default defineEventHandler(async (event) => {
  const { priceId, customerEmail } = await readBody(event)

  const session = await stripe.checkout.sessions.create({
    mode: 'subscription',
    line_items: [{ price: priceId, quantity: 1 }],
    customer_email: customerEmail,
    success_url: `${process.env.SITE_URL}/success?session_id={CHECKOUT_SESSION_ID}`,
    cancel_url: `${process.env.SITE_URL}/pricing`,
    automatic_tax: { enabled: true },           // Stripe Tax does the rest
    billing_address_collection: 'required'
  })

  return { url: session.url }
})

Where Paddle still wins

• 01Merchant-of-record model. They handle VAT, sales tax, the whole compliance surface.
• 02Best for small teams who want to ship a global SaaS and not think about cross-border tax.
• 03Pricing model is simpler at small volumes.
• 04Localised checkout copy and currency handled by default.

Where LemonSqueezy still wins

• 01Indie hackers shipping digital products with one developer and zero finance team.
• 02Faster onboarding than Stripe for very small accounts.
• 03Built-in affiliate tooling that you'd otherwise wire up yourself.
• 04MoR-style — fees are higher, but the compliance burden is much smaller.

Where GoCardless still wins

• 01B2B recurring billing in the UK and EU. Direct Debit is dramatically cheaper than card.
• 02Subscription products with large monthly recurring values — the per-card-charge fee on Stripe stops being acceptable above £200 / month.
• 03Industries (utilities, gym memberships, education) where Direct Debit is the cultural default.

"

Stripe is winning because they got the boring parts right ten years before anyone else cared. Tax, invoices, webhooks, refunds, dispute handling — none of it is glamorous. All of it is load-bearing. Most competitors still treat one or two of these as 'phase two'.

What we do

• 01Default to Stripe + Stripe Tax for any SaaS with a real team behind it.
• 02Paddle for solo founders shipping internationally without a finance setup.
• 03LemonSqueezy for one-off digital products or very small subscription products.
• 04GoCardless for B2B subscriptions with monthly values where card fees materially hurt margins.
• 05Avoid PayPal as a primary checkout. Offer it as a secondary if the audience demands it.

Stripe will keep winning. The interesting question for the next three years is whether anyone can build a true challenger that doesn't lose to Stripe's developer experience the moment a team has more than one engineer.